How we tell the story of the United States — and who’s included in it and how — has been an ongoing battle in the country for decades. It’s one currently being waged by the Trump administration, such as when it scrubbed references to Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from government webpages in the name of clamping down on “DEI.”
And in the 1990s, Disney had a particularly zany idea of how to tell the story of America — one that set off a culture war as the company sought to create an amusement park focused on US history, warts and all.
Disney’s America, the doomed amusement park, would have contained the story of immigration told through the Muppets’ musical-comedy stylings. It would have had sections dedicated to the Industrial Revolution, Native America, and the Civil War. It would, as Disney executives put it at the time, “make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave.”
The ensuing battle over Disney’s America would be one of Disney’s biggest failures — and a precursor to battles we’re still fighting today.
To learn more about what Disney tried to do, what ended up happening, and what it all means, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with historian Jacqui Shine.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Where does this story begin?
It begins with Michael Eisner, who came to Disney as its CEO and chairman in 1984. Eisner is ambitious, aggressive. Over the next 10 years, in what Disney buffs called the Disney Renaissance, the company has this enormous critical and commercial success with a run of animated movies. The juggernaut of this is The Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Aladdin.
Maybe high on that supply, Eisner announces this plan for what he calls the Disney decade, which is this broad expansion of the company’s parks and resorts. The most high-profile project here was Euro Disney Resort, which is now Disneyland Paris. And there’s high expectations for the Disney decade and for the success of the Parks program.
This doesn’t go quite the way that they hope it will. Euro Disney doesn’t do well at opening. It loses nearly a billion dollars in its first year. So the failure of Euro Disney leads the company to want to pivot to more US expansion on smaller park projects.
In 1991, the head of the parks division brings Eisner and Disney’s president Frank Wells to Colonial Williamsburg. This inspires this plan for a history-themed Disney Park, Disney’s America.
They want to put it in Virginia because they imagine that it can become part of the DC-area tourist economy, and that a Disney theme park that is about American history will fit really well into this context. This is not a project that was supposed to involve Mickey Mouse or any of the Disney icons. Disney was starting work on Pocahontas.
Eisner says that he was reading a lot about John Smith and Pocahontas and that internally, the company was interested in democracy as a sort of, as a thematic subject.
So Eisner and Disney have an idea of what they don’t want to do, and perhaps more importantly, what they do want to do with this park. To build it, obviously you’re going to need some land. I imagine Disney just didn’t already have a huge parcel of property in northern Virginia-ish. Do they buy some?
They do. Between 1991 and 1993, Disney secretly begins buying up parcels of land in the area through shell companies. The guy who was in charge of buying apparently used a fake persona; this was very undercover, this is all happening secretly. It is also less than five miles from a National Park Service Civil War Battlefield: Manassas. This is a place where about 3,700 men died and where there were about 25,000 total casualties.
They’re doing this secretly. At what point does Manassas find out that Mickey Mouse is buying up their land?
Almost everybody finds out in November 1993 when Disney announces the project.
I think initially people receive this warmly, because Disney’s promising a significant amount of economic development for the region and Disney is promising a complex experience of American history there. The guy who heads the Disney’s America project, Bob Weis, says in the press release they envisioned Disney’s America as a place to debate and discuss the future of our nation and to learn more about the past by living it.
And they are quick to say that this is a project that is not going to whitewash American history. Eisner is interviewed in the Washington Post the next day. He says that the park will present painful, disturbing, agonizing history. We’re going to be sensitive, but we will not be showing the absolute propaganda of the country. We will show the Civil War with all this racial conflict.
This was a very serious, very powerful, very successful entertainment executive saying, “We’re gonna make a kiddy theme park that will take our most brutal history seriously.”
Yes. And I think, like you, a lot of people had trouble with that contradiction. The day after this press release is issued, Disney holds a press conference in Haymarket. At this presser, Bob Weis, who is the senior vice president of imagineering, which is Disney’s creative division, says, “This will be entertaining in the sense that it would leave you something you could mull over. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the underground railroad.”
This moment, I think, comes to define this conflict in the public eye.
It’s such a nutty thing to hear a serious person say. Your kids could come to our theme park, home of Mickey Mouse, and find out what it’s like to be a slave. I imagine at this point, people are just like, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna need some more specifics.”
Yes. They put out a brochure, which is where a lot of the information that we have about what this would’ve been like comes from.
You enter at Crossroads USA, and there you board an 1840s train that takes you first to President Square, which they say celebrates the birth of democracy. It’s about the Revolutionary War.
You follow that to Native America. They say, “guests may visit an Indian village representing such eastern tribes as the Powhatans, or join in a harrowing Lewis and Clark raft expedition through pounding rapids and churning whirlpools.” We’re going to be educating people about Manifest Destiny here.
We move from Native America to the Civil War fort, where they say you’re going to experience the reality of a soldier’s daily life. After the Civil War fort, you go to a section on American immigration. And they’re going to build a replica Ellis Island building. Some sources indicate they would’ve done a show called The Muppets Take America.
The next section is a factory town called Enterprise that centers on a high-speed adventure ride called the Industrial Revolution. That involves a narrow escape from its fiery vat of molten steel.
Then you go to Victory Field, where guests may parachute from a plane or operate tanks and weapons in combat.
You then hit the last two areas, State Fair and Family Farm, to learn how to make homemade ice cream or milk a cow and even participate in a nearby country wedding, barn dance, and buffet.
This sounds like one doozy of a brochure. Does it work? Does it convince everyone?
Yes and no.
Does that slow down Michael Eisner? Is he ready to give up?
No. And that is where the fight begins. People hook in, in particular, to this idea that Disney’s going to include some element about American chattel slavery. And he is aggressive about saying, No, we weren’t going to do that. Why would you think that?
He is really persuaded that Disney’s big swing can work, that this idea has value and merit, and that the people who are standing against it are misguided.
At this point, is this fight relegated to Virginia, or is it getting bigger? This is obviously an international company with a huge cultural footprint.
It’s getting bigger. One of the things that contributes to this is that the Washington Post does a lot of coverage of this, which makes it go national. And it starts this debate in editorial pages about whether or not Disney can responsibly represent American history and whether or not the Disneyfication of American history is advisable.
And what happens when national papers, opinion columns start weighing in on this debate?
A few things happen. In early 1994, a strong coalition of opponents develops, including people who are concerned about preserving the environment there.
But then the historians get involved. The big guns come out when this group called Protect Historic America launches. This is a group of big-name, high-powered academic historians. This group of major figures stepped forward to say they’re concerned about education around the Civil War and about the park’s location near Manassas. In very short order, dozens and dozens of historians volunteer their time to write editorials, to comment to the media. They’re really fired up about this.
I read that this fight also somehow made it to the United States Congress. Why is this even Congress’s business?
This is one of the interesting things that comes out of Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee hearings. The entree into this is that this involves public lands of national importance. Five hundred people come to the Senate hearing, and Eisner’s really combative. He says about the people who are opposed to this, “I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff and I didn’t learn anything. It was pretty boring.”
At this point you’ve got historians speaking out about this. You’ve got op-ed columns being written, it sounds like all over the country. You’ve got a hearing on Capitol Hill. Are people out in the streets protesting this somewhere?
They are. Eisner is on the Hill trying to make nice with DC politicians and invites them to a special screening of The Lion King. But when they leave the theater, there are about a hundred protestors outside. Bigger than this though, in September 1994, 3,000 people march on the National Mall to protest Disney’s America.
Nationally, public support for the park has dropped to like 25 percent. At the end of September 1994, the company announces that Disney is withdrawing from the Virginia site. It’s clear that people don’t want it to be sited where it is, and they’re giving up. It’s over for Disney’s America. It is curtains for Disney’s America.
How do you think what happened in the ’90s connects to the kinds of fights we’re having about our history right now?
Any kind of debate about public history is always going to be about trying to stake some sort of political or ideological claim about the meaning of American history. Right now we see this very direct, very aggressive effort to insist on a positivist narrative about American history.
One of the things that I think people found puzzling about the early days of the Trump administration was that the National Endowment for the Humanities cut an enormous amount of active grants. And they issued new guidelines seeking projects, they say, that instill “an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” I think partly this is the administration’s backlash to efforts in the last decade to bring a more nuanced and complex understanding to structural oppression in US history.
We fantasize about American history in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places. I don’t know that Disney in seeking to do that was necessarily doing anything out of step with how we represent the American story.
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